Guidance for how to conduct remote hearings in Family Court

Very grateful to Gordon Exall of Civil Litigation blog for bringing this to my attention, and obviously a huge amount of work has gone into it by Mostyn J and MacDonald J.

Telephone hearings we are aware of and for short and reasonably non-contentious matters they are working well, but the issue facing us presently is how we do hearings where seeing the parties and assessing witnesses are to be done.

This document is not an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution, but it outlines the various challenges and solutions so that Courts can, with their local practitioners work out a scheme that works for them. This probably is not going to be of interest to my non-lawyer non-Judge readers, its a long document and it is really getting into the nuts and bolts of how you make a hearing conducted electronically work.

But it is a piece of guidance that is going to save hundreds of hours of duplication over the country as individual LAs and local bar and Courts try to work out what is best for their area, and I’m extremely grateful for the work that has gone into it.

If you are ill, I wish you well, and if you are well, I hope you stay that way. We are living through unprecedented times.